NYC schools chancellor Carmen Fariña has announced a new system for evaluating schools. Instead of grades and rankings, there will be a “school quality snapshot” and a “school quality guide.” These “tools” will be based on a new “capacity framework” (see image to the left).

At first glance, the framework is unremarkable and unobjectionable. Who can deny the value of “trust,” “effective school leadership,” and, at the very center, “student achievement”? Certainly terms such as “rigorous instruction” and “collaborative teachers” need definition—but doesn’t everything?

Yet the more I gaze at this framework, the more I wonder what it means.

First, I see that the terms have already been interpreted (in counter-intuitive ways) in the NYC DOE’s description.

At the center of the Framework is student achievement. The core goal of education is to help students get to the next level and succeed. Surrounding that core are the three elements of student support: instructional guidance, teacher empowerment, and student-centered learning. Beyond the classroom, the supports needed are effective school leadership and strong parent-community collaboration. The element that ties all of these supports together is trust. Building trust across the system and within a school—between administrators, educators, students, and families—is the foundation of the Capacity Framework.

I am puzzled by the second ring. What matches with what? Is “instructional guidance” in the description supposed to be the same as “rigorous instruction” in the chart? Is “teacher empowerment” supposed to be the same as “collaborative teaching”? Is “student-centered learning” the same as a “supportive environment”? If that is the intent, then these equations (and relations) must be explained and defended, and there must also be room to question them.

First, how is “rigorous instruction” in the graph related to “instructional guidance” in the description? What is instructional guidance, and who is being guided by whom? How does the guidance promote rigor? What is rigor, for that matter?

Second, is a “collaborative” teacher necessarily an “empowered” one? A truly “empowered” teacher may exercise the option of working alone at times (or even for long stretches of time). (Of course, good collaboration involves solitary work, but I see no acknowledgment of this here.)

Finally, one does not have to be “student-centered” (in the usual senses of the word) to be “supportive.” You can have a highly supportive environment combined with something more like “subject-centered instruction.” (I object to the term “student-centered” in general; it is often used to disparage certain kinds of teaching and curriculum offhand.)

Enough about the discrepancies. What about the graph itself?

Student achievement is at the core, as it should be, but achievement of what? The graph does not mention subject matter or curriculum. (Nor does the explanatory paragraph.)

Now, student achievement (of worthy things, we presume) clearly needs supports. Some of these supports include instruction, environment, and something pertaining to collaboration and solitude. I am not so sure that leadership should be located outside of that ring, but no matter. The chart is supposed to be visually appealing.

But how can “trust” be the outer ring? The description says that it is the “foundation”—but you can’t generate trust out of nowhere, or demand it as a precondition. It is hard earned; it comes out of the other things: achievement, instruction, leadership, environment, and so forth. Granted, the description says that “building trust,” not trust itself, is the foundation, but how can the foundation be something that you build as you go along?

Maybe it is silly to quibble with a chart. But I can already imagine the speeches: “We have to begin with trust. Trust is the foundation of our enterprise.” Of course, from the outset there has to be willingness to trust, but that is different from trust itself.

I do not disparage this framework. It contains good things. Alas, it needs clearer language and ideas.

It is an honor to be guest-blogging here along with Rachel Levy and Michael E. Lopez, two of my favorite education bloggers.

There’s much discussion lately (and not so lately) about what can be done to make teaching an elite profession. Some of the suggestions focus on teacher preparation; others, on teaching conditions. I will propose something that I haven’t heard mentioned: to improve conditions substantially, in a way that will encourage good teachers to stay, give each teacher a desk.

By this I mean a desk of one’s own (I’m thinking of Virginia Woolf), a desk that no one else uses, where items don’t get taken or shifted around; a desk in a relatively tranquil room, where one can work and think.

Why is this important, and why is it rare?

First, a disclaimer: I am not complaining about any particular school. Everywhere I have taught, there has been shortage of space, and teachers have had to share desks, use tables as desks, or go without a desk entirely. In my first school, one of my colleagues regularly did her work in the auditorium, in an audience seat. (It was possibly the quietest room in the building.)

I don’t think many people would question a teacher’s need for a desk–but I’m not sure they deem it especially important, either. For instance, they may consider it acceptable for teachers to share desks or to work in noisy classrooms. But many private schools have teachers’ desks in department offices, outside of the classrooms. This is both because they have space and because they recognize the importance of a desk.

Sharing a desk has all kinds of complications: your scissors disappear, your Gumby eraser walks away, your Machiavelli goes into exile, etc. Beyond that, a shared desk becomes, in the mind of the school, a shared desk. Anyone may sit at it.

Noisy classrooms can make it difficult to get work done, unless you have noise-cancelling headphones or can block out the sound. You end up doing most of your work at home.

There are also reasons that go beyond the practical. When you have a desk that’s reliable, you are able to do intellectual work–reading, lesson preparation, grading–during the school day. This affects the school’s atmosphere; there’s greater respect for the quiet work that goes on at the desk, since room is made for it. Like urban planning, a school’s allocation of space reflects its priorities.

Also, because this work does take place at school, it can give rise to interesting discussions. How different the conversation is between two teachers who have been thinking about Oedipus Rex, and two teachers who are running past each other in the hallway in search of a room or supplies. (I have had both kinds of conversations, with or without a desk, but there’s more room for the former when I have a place to work.)

Why, then, is it a rarity for each teacher to have a desk? [Read more…]

Ted Leach, an English and journalism teacher with a blog, posted a piece recently about the quiet of the early morning. He explains how he started the habit of rising at 5 a.m:

This is something that I’ve been doing for years, so long that the original reasons for it no longer hold true. When I first started teaching, I had about an hour drive to work, and I found that I wanted to ensure that I was awake when I got behind thewheel of the car. I thought the other drivers would appreciate it as well. So I started intentionally waking up, having breakfast, and getting on the road at 6 a.m.

And you know what? I came to like this time of day.

There’s a quiet to this time of the day, broken only by the sound of my fingers hitting the keyboard.

I came upon the piece when doing some, er, “self-searching.” I have enjoyed Leach’s blog before and am glad to return to it. I’ll be a more regular reader now.

that of place, with which my present discourse is specially taken up; that of time, as in the night, when there is solitude and silence even in public squares; that of the mind, as in persons who, absorbed in deepest contemplation, in broad daylight and in a crowded market-place, are not aware of what is going on there and are alone whenever and wherever they wish.

Many people think of solitude in terms of physical isolation. My book, Republic of Noise, focuses mainly on solitude of the mind. But solitude of time has a special quality. It is place, mind, and time at once.

When I was in high school, I used to arrive early in the morning so that I could enjoy the quiet of the halls. I would sit in my homeroom or walk around, and listen as people started arriving and the voices mixed and multiplied.

There’s solitude of season as well. In college, I liked to stay near the campus over the holidays. (I lived off campus after freshman year, so I didn’t have to clear out.) Walking through the courtyards alone, entering buildings and hearing nothing but the echo of my footsteps, I seemed to be in dialogue with the place.

In some way, these quiet times of day and of year are important to education, but how? They allow not only for untrammeled thought but for a different view of a familiar place. One recognizes gradations of light and sound. These gradations are important for study as well; you come to welcome those hours when you hear the book’s words more clearly.

And essential for teaching, from a practical standpoint, if you have a long commute or wish to get to school early. I like to have half an hour (ideally) at school before the first bell rings. For that, I have to leave home no later than 6:30. This is fine, though; I get to enjoy the long, sleepy train ride, where few people talk and there are usually empty seats.

Our culture is designed for gregarious team players, says Susan Cain, author of Quiet, in this TED talk on The Power of Introverts. Schools require children to work in groups, “even in the most solitary of assignments, such as creative writing,” she complains. Students need the chance to think and learn on their own too. “Solitude is the school of the soul.”

Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noisealso criticizes the mania for group work, collaboration and “groupthink,” rather than solitary contemplation.

“Our public schools, which should encourage students to see beyond the claims of the movement, have instead caved in to the immediate demands of the larger culture and economy. Convinced that the outside world calls for collaboration, school leaders and policymakers expect teachers to incorporate group work in their lessons, the more of it the better. They do not pay enough attention to the ingredients of good collaboration: independent thought, careful pondering of a topic, knowledge of the subject, and attentive listening.

“One oft-touted practice in elementary school is the ‘turn and talk’ activity, where a teacher pauses in a story she is reading aloud, asks a question, and has the students talk to their partners about it. When they are done, they join hands and raise them in the air. Instead of losing themselves in the story, they must immediately contend with the reactions of their peers. Many districts require small-group activities, throughout the grades, because such activities presumably allow all student to talk in a given lesson. Those who set and enforce such policies do not consider the drawbacks of so much talk. Talk needs a counterbalance of thought; without thought, it turns into chatter.”

I memorized a sonnet by Wordsworth in the 10th grade. Forty-odd years later, it stills comes to mind: “The world is too much with us; late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . . “

It is unclear what the future of group work holds, but I hope that it will be given its proper place–that it will be used when it actually serves the lesson and not when it doesn’t.

The Common Core State Standards seem ambivalent over the matter. The English language arts standards state, for instance, that third-grade students will “engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 3 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.” The emphasis here could be either on clarity of expression or on the range of collaborative discussions.

Group work has its place, but its place has been greatly exaggerated by proponents of various “workshop models,” Balanced Literacy, “21st century skills,” and so forth. People often forget that its quality depends on the contributions of its members. To contribute something substantial to a group, you have to do a great deal of work alone.

Working alone is not merely individualistic or competitive. It allows one to sift through thoughts, absorb information, commit information or literature to memory, think about it in different ways, try out ideas, slow down, speed up, and return to something one has learned or read before. For many, it is the happiest and most fruitful part of learning, along with the instruction itself.

When group work becomes a mainstay of instruction, it can limit the lesson and even the subject matter. The most common complaint about group work is that some students do much more work than others. But there are many more problems.

First, because students lack perspective on the subject, they are likely to disregard opinions that don’t make immediate sense to them. They may focus on those points of view that help them finish the task quickly. If someone in the group sees a problem with the entire premise, that person will likely be ignored.

Second (and related), because group work tends to focus on a task, the group members may not take time with questions that require time. They may take the shortest route to the goal, which for some topics and subjects is not the best. [Read more…]

This guest-blogging has been a great experience. Thanks again to Joanne Jacobs for inviting me, and thanks to all of you who commented. I will post one more piece this evening, on the subject of returning to one’s old school.